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Who lobbies for the little guy?

The Lowell Sun

Updated:
04/14/2013 06:35:21 AM EDT

Lobbying is really the fourth arm of federal government, after the executive, legislative and judicial branches. And the real question is just how much influence do lobbyists have over lawmakers who make the laws that corporations and individuals must live by?

Several months ago, Gail Collins of The New York Times wrote an eye-opening piece on the growing number of registered lobbyists in Washington and their relationships to members of Congress. She found there were 343 former elected officials -- both House and Senate members -- who are listed as lobbyists who regularly call on their former colleagues.

Add this number to the 545 members of Congress, and you can make an argument that there is another layer of the federal bureaucracy at work here, most of them well-paid and well-connected, representing all kinds of special interests. As Collins concluded, it's not illegal to be a lobbyist and most of the work they do is important to someone or something, but the access they get to the decision-makers certainly outweighs the time we the people get to share our viewpoints.

Yes, lobbyists do have influence, despite all the inside Washington talk that they don't. They can put a "bug" in someone's ear and the next day a large check arrives for a congressman's campaign account. It happens all the time. How the congressman and his staff respond to the relationship is the real question. With the high stakes involved in getting elected, resistance seems futile to some degree.

But the key point is what happens to legislation that affects us all.

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Americans like to complain that nothing gets done in Congress. It's not true. Hundreds of bills are passed every year, and most of them contain provisions that have nothing to do with the average American. However, taken in total, they show a system that caters to big corporations, defense contractors, pharmaceuticals, insurance companies, and Wall Street.

The list goes on and on. Some of the provisions are so arcane it is difficult to understand why it's a federal law in the first place. Yet it's there, usually to change the direction of things.

Last week, The New York Times did another sterling piece of reporting when it exposed the number of former congressional staffers who are working for the tax lobby and their relationships to high-ranking committee members. Tax talk is all the rage on Capitol Hill these days. Liberals want the rich to pay more, as well as shut down exemptions for corporations; conservatives want a tax overhaul where the rich pay less but most everyone pays something.

Against this paralyzing backdrop, the Times found that U.S. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Montana, has been lobbied by 28 of his former aides on tax issues since President Obama took the White House. Why is this significant? Since 2001, Baucus has been the powerful chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which is intent on rewriting the tax code.

Democrats don't like to own up to the fact that they, too, have rich interests on Wall Street. Under Baucus, his former aides have helped push through $11.2 billion in tax deferments for financial firms and a $222 million tax benefit for the liquor industry. Now these items wouldn't be so glaring if not for the fact that they came in one fell swoop -- the so-called fiscal-cliff legislation that was passed in January. While Americans thought lawmakers were trying to save money in a bulging budget deficit, Baucus and friends were giving more of it away.

Yet here's the rub. Baucus isn't the only one playing this duplicitous game. LegiStorm, an online database that tracks congressional staff transitions, identified eight Democrat and three Republican senators who have at least 12 or more former aides registered as lobbyists on tax issues. The total comes to 176, and some earn more than $500,000 a year.

Baucus' former Finance Campaign staff director, Jeffrey A. Forbes, is now one of these well-heeled lobbyists. He contributed a total of $25,000 to the senator's campaign, PAC committee and Montana Democratic Party.

Over the next several months, we'll see how the tax overhaul plays out. But already, Verizon, McDonald's, General Electric, the National Restaurant Association, and solar, wind and other energy companies are lining up to either retain their exemptions or get new ones. As for the little guy, there are no registered lobbyists listed.

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